Implementing static loaders and savers for the transfer of local and distributed data containers to and from storage systems can be difficult because there are so many different configurations of output formats, data containers and storage systems. Described herein is an extensible componentized data transfer framework for performant and scalable authoring of data loaders and data savers. Abstracted local and distributed workflows drive selection of plug-ins that can be composed by the framework into particular local or distributed scenario loaders and savers. Reusability and code sparsity are maximized.